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Little Town 4:050:00/4:05
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Premium 4:100:00/4:10
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Name Again 3:150:00/3:15
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Day Room 3:340:00/3:34
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Wacky Writer 3:150:00/3:15
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Treatment Room 5:580:00/5:58
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Party In My Mind 2:440:00/2:44
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Harry 3:460:00/3:46
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Deep Dish Pizza 2:520:00/2:52
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In Between Scene 3:440:00/3:44
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Man Gone, TV On 3:520:00/3:52
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Fifty-Fifty 3:460:00/3:46
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New York, New York 3:390:00/3:39
PAULZILLA
One late afternoon in 1995, a well-known character of ill repute approached me on the mean streets of Northampton. His name was Paul Shoul.
Shoul: “You’re a musician, right?”
Rocha: “Yep.”
Shoul: “You know Paul Harthorne?”
Rocha: “Yeah, I know him a bit.”
Shoul: “Well we’ve been getting together playing music. Writing songs. We’re having a lot of fun and we were thinking because your name’s Paul, and you seem kinda cool, and we’re all short, maybe we should start a band. Wuddaya think?”
Rocha: “Sure!”
We started getting together and it was a blast from the beginning. I material was funny. And we just gelled.
We soon added a friend of mine, Tommy Borawski, of The Sighs fame, a rock-solid drummer from Northampton with whom I had played before.
Shoul played acoustic and harmonica, and wrote and sang songs. Hartshorne played electric, sang, and wrote songs too. I played bass, and sang backup. We loved the hang, the playing, and making each other laugh.
Rocha - Shoul - Hartshorne - Tommy B. in front ~ The Elmwood Inn, Hadley, MA - 95-96
After gigging for a while, we decided to record the songs we had. In May ‘96, we tracked drums for thirteen songs at Slaughterhouse Recording Studio in Hadley, MA with Tommy Pluta engineering. I had a 16-track studio at home. We’d record the rest there. I was still learning how to use the digital machines and how to back-up data and not lose data. I sometimes lost data.
In early 1997, I sprung an emotional leak and retreated; and the project stalled, and that’s on me. We got back together and tried playing as a band again, but the whole vibe was lost. Spending too much time in the studio can kill a band, and it did this one. The recorded material was in decent shape, but I was on to other things. The tracks sat rarely touched for twelve years.
In late 2009, I digitized all the Zilla tracks. In 2016, I went through this material enough that by 2018, I had sent four songs off to Northampton studio wizard, Jim Weeks at Cloud Cuckoo Land Studio to mix. Between 2020 and '22, I sent him the remaining nine.
It would be a profound understatement to say Jim did not only a great job mixing this record, but also a miraculous job of saving these highly compromised drum tracks. He painstakingly rehabilitated them and made this record possible.
In April 2022, old pal, Pete Keppler mastered it for us at The Treehouse in Lake Katonah, NY. Shoul took a photo for the cover and my old roomie, Richard Cahillane released it on his label, Cooleyville Records out of Shutesbury, MA and the rest is history. I’m really proud of this record. And I love those guys to pieces.
~ Paul Rocha, 2026 ~